The Labor Department is scheduled to release its December payrolls report in a few hours and expectations are high that we’ll see a strong number. Yesterday’s potent update from ADP on jobs creation in the private sector last month certainly strengthened the outlook. The consensus forecast for private jobs creation for today’s release: +170,000, according to Briefing.com. Meanwhile, running a simple linear regression model on the historical data set of ADP numbers vs. the Labor Department’s private payrolls since 2000 implies that today’s update will post a rise of 249,000. Statistical models should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but there you have it. As for the actual figure, the answer is….